Austin is commonly thought of as a bad neighborhood, but if you're looking for Jesus or a haircut, there's no better place.
The stretch of North Avenue between Austin Boulevard and Pulaski Road is home to the Apostolic Miracle Healing Temple, Abundant Life Ministries and the Evangelical Church of God in Christ, among at least a dozen other places of worship, as well as the Pink Orchard Salon, Tony's Tight Fades and the Never on Monday Hair and Nail Salon. Don't be confused amidst the surfeit: The place called Fresh Start is a barbershop, not a church.
Never before have I noticed the superabundance of beauticians and born-agains on this stretch of North Avenue, possibly because I'm usually driving through with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Today I'm walking; in fact, I'm walking all the way down North Avenue, from Oak Park to the lake.
If you like Chicago because it's diverse, then North Avenue is a good street to walk: In a mere 9.1 miles and seventy-two blocks, it neatly bisects some of the North and Northwest Sides' defining neighborhoods, creating a cross section of city culture. It's also one long testament to the cartographic complexities of urban life, cutting through ten wards, forty-five census tracts, three Department of Planning and Development "community planning districts," three police districts (for a total of eighteen beats), seven board districts and four judicial subdistricts.
Technically, my journey starts not in Austin, but on the characterless, beige, twenty-block stretch of North that is the southern boundary of northern Chicago and the northern boundary of Oak Park, home of Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright and, according to the 1990 census, about 42,000 white people. Maybe it's unfair to define Oak Park strictly in terms of its Caucasian population, but the juxtaposition makes comparisons irresistible:
Oak Park is 77 percent white, Austin 87 percent black.
On the north side of North, right where the city begins, is an old Sears, a building that sits like a fortress, its American flag flapping listlessly in the mid-day humidity. Though it looms with medieval austerity, the building is a transplant not from the Middle Ages, but from mid-century America, a time before Targets and Big K-Marts drove free-standing department stores like this one out of the game.
"Notice to the Public," reads a faded, rusty sign screwed into the building's south face. "Solicitation or Distribution of Handbills or Circulars Prohibited on These Premises Without Permission. Sears, Roebuck & Co." The anachronistic worry that communists and anarcho-syndicalists may be lurking about, preparing to do some covert pamphleteering, has an almost Rockwellian charm.
I manage to stay grounded in time, however, thanks to the plethora of more modern establishments: The Blockbuster, the Walgreens, the Shell, the other Blockbuster. North between Harlem and Austin is a tussle between exemplars of the modern, plastic, fast-food America and outposts of the suburban idyll that lies just west and south. Dentists and insurance offices trade off with Boston Markets and Checks Cashed ("Quick, Easy and Confidential!"). Trees dot the avenue; a smiling dad pulls his kid in a Radio Flyer. In Al's Barbershop, which features the old school candy-stripe poles, a tough-looking bearded white man (I hope it's Al) gives a crew cut.
At Linden - still twelve blocks or so short of Austin - I stop for a breather and to chat with a middle-aged African-American guy dozing in the front seat of his car, a straw hat pulled down over his eyes, waiting for his wife to wrap up her errands. "This neighborhood here is pretty nice," he says with no particular enthusiasm. "No bad neighborhoods here. No, it's nice out here, real quiet."
I nod, and then he jerks his thumb over his shoulder, indicating Columbian Avenue and points further east. "It's worse going that way. Gets much worse back that way."
Undaunted, I travel on, shedding Oak Park completely and entering the city proper. Crossing Austin Boulevard, my already-tiring legs are buoyed by an adrenaline rush, the burst of excitement that comes with breaking a taboo. There is no mistaking I have broken through the invisible "Police Line: Do Not Cross" tape that binds certain neighborhoods in the white psyche: What few Caucasian faces still dotted North Avenue a few blocks back have now entirely disappeared. Soon the hair salons will begin in earnest, but the first business to greet me within the bounds of the Austin neighborhood is J&J's Cut-Rate Liquor. That a booze merchant should stand sentinel here carries some irony, considering the story of Henry Austin. The late-nineteenth-century financier and legislator - active in the public life of Cicero, of which Austin was once a part - was famous for his Illinois Temperance Law, which dried out the city's surrounding townships long before Prohibition.
Henry Austin might disapprove, but, in an area where so many storefronts are deserted, a liquor store seems better than no store at all. A whole series of vacant lots and boarded-up shops confronts me as I continue down North. Such empty sites are the sworn enemy of Willy Ross of the North Avenue Business Association; when I check in with him after my walk, he offers several reasons why businesses have trouble in his neighborhood.
For one thing, "There's no parking," Ross points out. "So it's a tougher sale for smaller businesses. There's no space for parking lots: As soon as you hit Austin, the area just compacts."
Parking, schmarking, I contend. Isn't the problem all the crime and stuff?
"In the last few years, the amount of crime on North Avenue has been curbed," Ross counters. "Crime on North Avenue - well, I'm not going to say it's great, but it's going down."
A few blocks east of J&J's, I am startled by a voice hollering at me from an upstairs window; I can't quite make out what he's saying, but it must be something threatening. "What?" I answer, preparing to toss up my wallet. "Chicago is the best city," comes the answer, clearly yelling with the intention of being captured on my tape recorder.
The speaker, an affable teenager named Lorenzo, and I discourse briefly on the quality of Austin, where he's grown up. "It's an OK neighborhood," he says judiciously. "Sometimes it can be good, sometimes it can be bad, you know?" Like, violent bad? "No. Sometimes the cops come around, tell you to turn down the loud music."
My conversation with Lorenzo is a good reminder that danger is all relative. Someone who's done a lot of thinking about such urbania is Tom Geoghegan, the local lawyer, labor activist and playwright, whose book "The Secret Lives of Citizens" talks about, among other things, how whites and blacks see each other in modern city environments.
"Let's say three 28-year-old white guys get in a car together and head out to one of the worst neighborhoods," he proposes. "Now let's say it's a Latino or African-American neighborhood, and they're three or four Lincoln Park yuppies, and they're going along. Are they in danger or are they safe? It could be that everybody thinks they're cops. When does anybody [in that neighborhood] see a bunch of white people together? So they come down the street and people may dive into the alleys.
"Generally speaking," Geoghegan concludes, "You're more at risk in the city if you're Latino or African-American, no matter what neighborhood you go into."
If Ross' efforts are successful, there will soon be many more businesses in the area - he's hoping to get a big theme restaurant, ˆ la Michael Jordan's, into the community - but, in the meantime, those already present do their best. Besides all the churches and barbershops, there's plenty of food: At Long Avenue, for example, I pass the King's Wings and Other Things, the Soul Food Kitchen, Cap'n Bob's Black Steer Seafood and the Original Culver's Bakery. Overlooking it all is a billboard for McDonald's, tempting the hungry to "Get Jiggy at $1.99 for Combo Meals."
Other stores include everything from the Quality Building Supply Company to the Kiejo School of Karate. There's also a Wendy's, a Popeye's, a Walgreens, a couple of SpinCycle Laundromats, plus plenty of places offering beepers, check-cashing services and liquor.
One local business that's hard to miss is that of Herbert Perry, an older black man who bicycles along trailing upwards of ten shopping carts brimming with appliances, an old guitar, a "Say Yes to Jesus" T-shirt, baseball caps, earrings and sunglasses. This movable general store has earned him write-ups in the Sun-Times and the National Enquirer, clippings he displays, laminated and dry-mounted, amongst the merchandise.
And then there's Future World, a storefront at Lotus Avenue that I find impossible to pass unexamined. As it turns out, it's nothing but another hair salon, and one that seems to have recently gone under. The Future looks bleak: gates are drawn across the window, the checkerboard floor is splattered with paint, and dust coats the radiators and empty cabinets.
At Kostner Avenue I have once again crossed a boundary line, and the universe shifts as quickly and completely as it did at Austin. Suddenly, all the bakeries (and there's plenty of them) are panaderias, the grocery store is a carniceria y fruteria, and the ad for Heineken bears the tag "no cabe duda." Latin music blares from the doorways of numerous discotecas. I cross paths with a young Latino man in a sleeveless T-shirt, pushing a Tito's Ice Cream cart; though I could definitely use some ice cream, I am stymied by the Spanish flavor names.
Humboldt Park shares a similar evolutionary story with Austin: Once upon a time, these were multi-ethnic neighborhoods, where Swedes, Jews, Poles and Greeks mixed it up in the first half of the century. In West Town (the larger community that contains Humboldt Park, along with Ukrainian Village and Wicker Park), it was the construction of the Kennedy Expressway that sparked the flight of the older ethnic groups; in Austin, it was the westward expansion of the black population.
At Central Park - which, at 3600 west, is the exact mid-point of my walk - I'm overwhelmed by the archetypal nasty life-in-the-city smell, a raw funk of decaying garbage and shit. Not for the first time, I consider hopping on the 72 and concluding this little experiment via the CTA. But a moment later my eye is caught by a Psychic Readings Studio offering gift certificates, and I remember that the city streets are too intriguing to abandon.
In the heart of Humboldt, there is no let-up on the number of hair places - Irene's, Perisur, Flor's Unisex, Sonia's Unisex - but I'm more interested in the numerous shops doing a brisk business with displays set up on the sidewalk. Outside a shoe store, a salesman who can't be more than 15 tries to hard talk me into new sneakers. At the enormous Salvation Army Thrift Store (Tienda de Segunda) at Kedvale, I browse furniture, toys, baking supplies and an out-of-season display of Halloween costumes.
At all of these outdoor markets, the clientele chatter amiably with one another and the merchants, creating a strong feeling of community. From a business perspective, the Latin stretches of North have something going for them that the black areas don't; namely, residents are more likely to do their shopping within the neighborhood because they know the vendor will be able to habla with them. As Ross notes, "It's more unified [in Humboldt Park], because everybody speaks Spanish. They feel better there, they're able to communicate."
Which almost makes you think that urban segregation works out best for everyone. My mind wanders towards the argument that people are happier hanging with their own kind; but the reasons for segregation have at least as much to do with the financial power of the majority as with communitarian instincts. As UIC sociology professor Anthony Orum explains, there exists an entire infrastructure dedicated to buttressing urban segregation. "A lot of the reasons for segregation have to do with banks and real estate communities, laws and housing codes," Orum says. Plus good old-fashioned ignorance and fear: "More and more, fear is written into our sense of the city. Areas get reputations based on people's fears."
Later I'll check out a book Orum recommends, Douglas S. Massey's "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass," which details all the awful things our society still does - post-Fair Housing Act, post-Civil Rights Act, post-everything - to keep minorities out of the way. For the moment, however, my battle isn't against The Man, but my tired legs and the miserable heat. A mile or so past the Tienda de Segunda, I'm passing Humboldt Park itself, its massive lush greenery begging, practically demanding, that I lay down in it for a while.
Resisting the temptation, I'm rewarded at Mozart Street by the sprinkler outside Burger King. Also enjoying its spray is a bunch of junior-high kids with a basketball, who pepper me with questions. "Did you go to high school?" Yeah. "Did you go to college?" Yup. "How long did it take you?" Four years. "That's pretty good."
I start to say thanks, but I'm interrupted: "I'm hoping to do it in two."
The aesthetic of the buildings soon begins to change, with brick townhomes appearing more regularly, along with a cycle shop and a pet supply store, my first of the day. At Hoyne (which was, incidentally, Chicago's first paved street) comes official notice that I've entered Wicker Park: A young white man passes, his hair cut short, bearing wallet chain, Doc Martens and long gray pants despite the day's grueling heat.
Of the neighborhoods along North, Wicker Park is the most racially diverse. As of the 1990 census, the area was running about 50 percent white, 50 percent everyone else, although more recent signs suggest that Wicker Park diversity may be going to the way of the dodo. (But there's no way to know for sure until they finish the new census.) Here is where the DIY Generation lives and breathes - going to shows at Subterranean, buying records at Quaker Goes Deaf, keeping up with alt-lit at Quimby's - but it's also an enclave of the Latino middle class.
At 1pm on this ultra-humid Friday afternoon, few from either demographic are on the streets of Wicker Park. I content myself contemplating the costs of life, as posted by Perez and Davis, Attorneys at Law, on the imposing flag-topped brick tower at Damen: "Divorce: $850. Bankruptcy $650. Real Estate Closings, Buy $350, sell $450."
I also take a moment to mourn the recent passing of Wicker Park Dog, and to note that its facade isn't the only one with paper on the windows. A surprising number of storefronts surrounding the Damen/North/ Milwaukee epicenter are in transition, For Lease or Under Construction or both. Just east of Damen, a block of new condos is going up, the next wave of gentrification underway. Under the Kennedy Expressway, a man is sleeping, curled up next to his pile of stuff. Next to the highway is a man approaching merging cars, asking for change. It is probably overly romantic of me to imagine that the two men take turns, one begging while the other snoozes.
I am now more than two-thirds of the way done, and the only major hurdle remaining is the long pseudo-industrial corridor between Wicker Park and Halsted Avenue. This area is dominated by two massive elements: One is the Chicago River, the other a twenty-four-hour Home Depot. The rest is all squat one-story brick buildings with signs like Chicago Gasket: Product of Teflon. Across from the home furnishings Death Star is a weed-grown vacant lot with one of those "Work At Home: $1500 a Week" fliers stuck unceremoniously on the perimeter fence.
Crossing the bridge, I stop to gaze south toward Goose Island. A semi-circle of benches has been erected off the sidewalk for just this purpose, along with a sign that probably describes the view and history of the area; unfortunately, the sign is as trashed and untended as the benches. The water is brown, the view is decidedly unspectacular, and an open trash can sits next to the bench. I keep walking.
It isn't skin color that alerts me I've arrived at the last dimension shift of my trip, but a strip mall. Unlike the Cleaners/Checks Cashed/Cigarettes Cheaper centers that dotted most of the route, the one at Clybourn offers Starbucks, Closet Works, Omaha Steaks and something called the Box Shoppe. Soon, boasts a banner, there will be an Old Navy here. I know that I've returned to the bosom of the privileged whites: People who have enoughspace to require a closet store, enough stuff to require a shop for boxes, enough scratch to spend $4 on coffee.
This is where I begin to tune out, lured by the nearness of my goal and less curious about the world I already know. I remember seeing Uncle Julio, he of Uncle Julio's Fine Mexican Food, leering menacingly from his rotating sign. I remember wondering why the Crate & Barrel outlet store is a half block from the regular Crate & Barrel store. I remember the guy in some sort of boxing helmet, getting off the bus at Halsted with a stack of books under each arm, muttering and shaking. Eccentricity, of course, knows no boundaries.
I remember passing Larrabee, glancing south at Cabrini Green and moving hurriedly along, my fears not quite unlearned.
Finally I stumble through the heart of Old Town, at North and Wells, passing the tenth McDonald's, the fiftieth Blockbuster, the millionth Walgreens. An early plan to have a recuperative lunch at The Original Mitchell's, culinary counterpart to the cultural landmarks that surround it - Moody Bible Institute, Chicago Historical Society, Latin School - is abandoned: The end is in sight, and to it's too late to stop now.
The handful of park-side blocks between Clark and Lake Shore are important for a couple of reasons: For one thing, from here to the end, North Avenue is North Boulevard, the city's northern boundary when originally incorporated in 1837. For another, it's the home stretch. Amongst the handsome glass condos, I sit down heavily against the divider separating the North Avenue cul-de-sac from the cars rushing by on Lake Shore Drive, take a deep breath of beach air and exhaust, and look back the way I came.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.